So mom wants to rest, and the boy wants to play… and dad wouldn’t mind getting out of the house for a bit and blow stuff up. Sounds like this is a fever that calls out for less cowbell and more arcade.
For those not in the know, Twin Galaxies has been doing trading cards of various significant events and people in video gaming history, with an emphasis on high-scoring super-achievers in the competitive gaming scene. To be honest, I hadn’t paid a huge amount of attention to the cards – I was always more into the collecting scene, drooling over unearthed prototypes and so on, than I ever was into playing competitively. (The funny thing about me, as much as I love video games, especially older ones, is this: there’s an awful lot of them that I can’t play particularly well. There are a great many classic games at which I positively stink.) Also, the last thing I need to worry about right now is starting a new collection of anything, not when I’ve spent recent years liquidating much of my prized collection just to pay the bills. The guts and the soul have been ripped out of my game collection…and as silly as it may sound, getting rid of the stuff was enough of a blow that I’m not sure I could even dream of going back. Places like Arkadia Retrocade have made it less of a priority (in fact, I’ve given them stuff that I hadn’t sold, just so other folks could enjoy the items in question rather than them being locked up forever in my room).
I go on occasional video-game-playing sprees now and again (me and the boy tag-teamed Kirby’s Return To Dream Land the other night and beat it), but for the most part I’m done with collecting. I gave up collecting so I could enjoy playing (apparently quite badly a lot of the time). What I hang onto the most is not having Owned Things, but having Told Stories – the stuff I’ve written, the DVDs I’ve produced, that sort of thing. That, to me, still matters.
Abruptly jumping tracks here, Friday was a crappy day. I was trying to follow-up with places at which I’d applied for work, and came up empty. One place I tried to follow-up with had apparently had the phone disconnected. I went to the building where I’d sat and filled out an application two weeks before. The windows were empty, the sign was gone, and the place was now vacant. I really hated Friday. I really hate being broke. I’m not big on craving validation from the outside world: you can chase your own tail for your whole life if that’s what you’re seeking. The best course of action, the most soul-preserving one, is simply Not Giving A Shit. (Of course, when you go that route, the people from whom you couldn’t get validation anyway will raise hell about it, because you’re no longer buying into the system that justifies them and gives them validation. They tend to feel threatened by that.)
But I really could’ve used a quick pat on the back and a “hey, good work there” from the universe on that day. And lo and behold, these arrived in the mail:
…courtesy of Classic Gamer Magazine editor Chris Cavanaugh. Up until Cav sent these to me, I had no idea that I was mentioned on the back as one of the magazine’s contributors, my name wedged in between some of my best friends and biggest influences. (To even be mentioned in the same breath with Bill Kunkel would’ve knocked eight-year-old me over with a feather: Electronic Games Magazine was one of the key things that made me devote my life to learning how to write reasonably well at a young age.)
So there you have it. Validation. Maybe it doesn’t put food on the table, but you know what? I’ll still take that little pat on the back from the universe.… Read more
Yesterday afternoon, I asked my son how his school day had gone when I picked him up from school.
He proceeded to tell me that a dragon who eats nothing but computers had eaten all the computers in town, but that he could make a new computer, out of nothing but Cheez-Its, that would run on AA batteries, for an R&D budget of “four hundred and fifty-six pooty-butt dollars”* and this would stop the dragon.
Before I could even work out an exchange rate, I was informed that, after it had “sucked 80 guards into its tummy,” the dragon was slain by one guard with a giant sword. Also, he got almost all of his work done before recess, and did more work after recess to make up for the fact that we were stranded by ice on Tuesday and couldn’t make it off the hill.
I love my kid. 😆
* Go on, laugh. The government would waste many more pooty-butt dollars on this research and you know it.… Read more
We like to buy into the notion that there’s no limit to what we can achieve, but the truth that we run into more often is that there are limits – very finite limits – to how much time we have to pour into achieving the amazing. Things have come up recently that made me realize… I simply don’t have all the time that I thought I had to pour awesomesauce all over the universe. Projects that I had hoped to start and finish… I’m going to have to let them stew for a good long while, or watch as someone else finishes them. Other things already in progress will need to be simplified out of necessity. Time is really my biggest obstacle here.
This summer, the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD set will be going out of print. The reasons for this are numerous, but it basically boils down to “too many problems in trying to move inventory of physical things out the door”, whether it’s Paypal payment notifications winding up spamqueued (and then me being contacted by buyers wanting to know, quite rightly, where their stuff is), to making it to the post office in a timely manner (the recent heap of ice storms certainly hasn’t helped in that regard), and the gut feeling that, quite honestly, DVD has had its day (it’s like continuing to sell cassettes in a compact disc world, though I still maintain that the imminent arrival of 4K makes Blu-Ray little more than DAT by that analogy). I don’t have the time or resources to re-create the entire project in HD (as much as I’d like to fix some stuff with regards to video and sound quality).
In the place of the physical DVDs, I will be instituting a download service very soon, which I am beta testing right now. It will allow those still interested in acquiring the material on the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs to obtain either MP4 video files or a downloadable DVD .ISO file so they can burn their own disc if they absolutely have to have a physical copy. The physical copies remaining in inventory will become “convention exclusives” or something that can only be obtained by special arrangement. Once those physical copies are gone, even the “special arrangement” goes away: I won’t be burning any more of them.
As of 2014, it’s been ten years since the earliest versions of a PDF video project were edited together (much of which was revised for the first PDF DVD); it was originally a running, looping display-only DVD which appeared in OVGE’s second year, featuring music by 8-Bit Weapon, with the agreement that it would never be sold in that form. That’s really not a bad run. And I’m still very proud of what I was able to do with the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs. In terms of what most people probably think of as a documentary, the format may be a little strange (and current and upcoming projects, such as Game Play and The Video Craze, will fulfill the more traditional documentary niche for most folks), but I’m very fond of both volumes, especially the second one.
After Phosphor Dot Fossils relaunches in this format, Best Of CGE ’03 and Best Of CGE ’05 will go digital-only. With those, I have a very specific game plan – you’ll be able to buy the entire contents as a bundle of MP4s or a 
burnable DVD .ISO file, or you’ll be able to just download the panels you want to see without having to pay for those in which you have no interest. These are already more or less out of print – I have tiny number of them on hand for conventions (2 copies of each) and otherwise they’re burn-on-demand as orders come in.
The same infrastructure will also be used to sell ebooks of VWORP!1, VWORP!2 and my other books. I’m still planning to have physical copies available through Amazon/Createspace and at convention appearances (probably in more limited numbers than in the past).
I’m a dad with a lot of stuff on my plate, and it’s time for me to let this other stuff that I’ve already done make a bit of money for me with less ongoing effort. Think of this as the nephew of the decision to stop hand-coding my pages and switch to WordPress several years ago: it’s a move to spend more time creating and promoting, and less time on back-end grunt work.
So is anything falling by the wayside? Yes, sadly. I’ve made little secret, in recent years, of the work I was doing on getting a video-based webseries up and running. What’s rapidly becoming apparent is that I’ve run out of the kind of time it takes to throw my entire life at a project like that. Much of the material I’d already written for that will be transferred to an upcoming book/ebook; as for the basic outline of doing it for TV or web video, I think it’s still sound. I might get back to it in that form, or I might let someone I trust run with it. Time will tell.
That’s where things stand at the moment. Consider this the shout of “last call!” for Phosphor Dot Fossils in its DVD incarnation. Make way for the future.… Read more
After yesterday’s 14+ hour long ice storm, the roads across Arkansas are basically poo. They’re slick as poo, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to poo if you try to drive on them, for there shall certainly be a crash of things. Repeating, for clarity: poo. (The city of Fort Smith was closed today. Not the schools. Not the courthouse. The whole city.)
Let’s watch again, in animated form, as the roads and highways in Arkansas resolutely refuse to improve in any meaningful way. … Read more
Yet. another. winter. storm. We are under an ice storm warning. I’m out of invectives to hurl at the atmosphere, so instead of animating radar images, I will let the official road conditions website of the Arkansas Highway & Transportation Department tell this story. In song. … Read more
… 